Zinc! Manganese dioxide! Inanimate carbon rods!
This tutorial shows how to take apart a spent zinc-carbon dry cell of the common household type. Besides making for an interesting object lesson in electrochemistry, taking apart a spent D-cell, for instance, allows you to salvage many materials which can be of use to amateur chemists–materials which would otherwise probably end up in a landfill. Separated from their reactive components, the leftover parts of the battery can be safely added to most municipal recycling streams.

My son has a series of books that feature a frightened squirrel as the main character. Yesterday, when we were wondering what to do with our afternoon, we decided to build an appropriately sized nut tree for his plush squirrel puppet toy.

This guide will demonstrate how to build a fake tree for a child’s room. Our tree was made to house a certain frightened squirrel featured in a popular book series, but this build could be adapted for any number of tree-bound lovies.

This guide shows how to build a rechargable LED lantern that is virtually indestructable, charges wirelessly, and is very cheap.

The original LED lantern were featured in MAKE: Magazine, issue 30. When I first saw the article, I thought that they could only be used once, as they would have to be glued shut. When I read it, I realized that they were sealed with tape, and could therefore be opened, but not before I came up with a new idea.